Corpora, such as the British National Corpus, are typically large collections of authentic text. The texts are taken from both spoken and written use of language in real world situations, and stored in databases.
Concordancing software, such as the popular and freely available Antconc programme, make use of corpora by searching and analysing them to help the user identify patterns of language use, such as collocations. A single corpus or a number of them can be uploaded in the concordancer and the search results depend on the search criteria. The use of an asterisk is useful as a wildcard feature.
With limited time in the classroom and so much language to teach, choosing the most important words and phrases to teach is a conundrum often faced by teachers. Concardancers have helped to reveal the most frequently used words. Lists of these can be readily found online, e.g. Longman Communication 3000. Nation (2006) suggests that a vocabulary size of between 3,000 and 4,000 word families is necessary to be able to access authentic texts, which of course should be from the most frequently used words. Otherwise, it would be far less fruitful. Teachers generally possess good intuition about word frequency but at times certain words are difficult to classify and guesses can be counter-intuitive. Word frequency lists can help with this issue.
In my view, the teaching and learning of collocations is where the use of corpora and concordancers is particularly useful in, and out of, the ESL classroom. Students can search corpora for the target language, or ‘keyword in context’, and learn collocations from the many instances of use found, being able to read around them as much as needed to gain more context. Concordancers can help distinguish between strong collocations and weaker ones, and different categories may emerge, for example ones connected to feelings as opposed to thoughts. Daskalovska (2013) found that students who used concondancers to learn collocations had gained more knowledge of them and achieved better test results.
The teacher can get students to guess the most frequent collocates with words and use a concordancer to check answers. Conversely, the teacher may provide collocates to get their students to guess the word that they all go with. The competitive nature of these methods may arouse interest in collocations, which have been found to be crucial in language learners sounding more native-like (Pawley & Syder, 1983).
Students can look up examples of the target language in a corcondancer and then guess the meaning from the given contexts. Seeing real world usage of the words can give students a deeper understanding of them, which can help to retain the meaning/s. This is especially the case with polysemous words, such as ‘point’, where the word class is particularly important to decipher.
Concordancers can be used to check the occurrence of words that have subtle differences in meaning, such as ‘look’ and ‘see’, in order to help differentiate between them. This inductive approach can also be taken to help clarify grammar rules, for example the uses of ‘some’ and ‘any’, whereby rules can be deduced by students themselves. Similarly, the function of affixes may also be investigated, and getting students to guess the most frequently used ones with a word adds a fun element to the task.
Additionally, students can use the vast amount of examples of texts available to conduct error correction of their own written work and identify mistaken usage of words, phrases, collocations and grammar. This inductive learning from real world examples may lead to better understanding and improved accuracy in future (Sinclair, 2004).
Corpora and concordancing software have been traditionally used to create dictionaries but they have not been known to have been fully exploited by ESL teachers or materials designers. They can seem daunting to first-time users due to the strenuous prospect of analysing language, the sheer size of data available and the generally dull and ‘techi’ look of the software. However, with a bit of practise, the use of corpora and condancers can help ESL teachers to enhance the quality of their teaching by having more confidence in teaching the rights things, in a good way. In encouraging learners to also use them, teachers can empower them and help them reach higher on Marzano’s (2001) learning goals; towards investigation, monitoring and efficiency.
A slide share on ‘Corpus Tools for Language Teaching’
Some further reading:
Daskalovska, N. (2015). Corpus-based versus traditional learning of collocations. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 28(2), 130-144.
Sinclair, J. M. (Ed.). (2004). How to use corpora in language teaching (Vol. 12). John Benjamins Publishing.
Technology in TESOL 
Yes, I also believe using corpora and concordancers for English language learning and teaching would improve quality. However, as you say it may seem too daunting for both students and teachers alike. I suppose they can just do an online search for the examples of language use they’re looking for. Also, I guess they’re not so useful for beginners?
Further reading on the topic:
Kettemann, B. (1995). On the use of concordancing in ELT. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 29-41.
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Thank you for your comments and suggestion for further reading.
Doing an online search for examples of particular use of language is easier to do and may be beneficial to a certain extent. However, sifting through the results to find relevant examples would be taxing and waste a lot of time. Concordancers are much better for that purpose.
Regarding beginners using them, Chamber (2007) cites the text difficulty in corpora. However, there are learner corpora around, which include language that is easier for beginners to access. Having said that, as long as the learner is not a total beginner, they can benefit from the authentic use of language found and it would be up to the teacher to make use of it in an accessible way. But yes, they may struggle with it independently.
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